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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Megaupload.com Taken Down. Piracy Indictment

The Justice Department has indicted seven individuals and two companies behind the popular file sharing website Megaupload.com which has been touted by stars will.i.am, Kim Kardashian and Puff Daddy.

The indictment alleges that the website and a shell company associated with the website, Vestor Limited, caused an estimated half-billion dollars in copyright losses and made an estimated $175 million in proceeds. The website was established in 2005 and at one point ranked as the 13th most visited website on the Internet.

The feds indicted the site's founder, Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, a 37-year-old resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand. He was arrested in New Zealand by New Zealand authorities.

The indictment accuses the suspects of being members of "the Mega Conspiracy, a worldwide criminal organization whose members engaged in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale."

The case comes a day after internet companies and websites such as Google, WordPress and Wikipedia protested about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

An hour after the indictment was announced, the Justice Department's website, www.Justice.gov, came under cyberattack with a denial-of-service attack. Anonymous, the hacktivist computer group, is claiming responsibility.

The indictment returned by a grand jury in Virginia alleges, "In exchange for payment, the Mega Conspiracy provides the fast reproduction and distribution of infringing copies of copyrighted works from its computer servers located around the world. Premium users of the site... are able to download and upload files with few, if any, limitations."

Describing the operation of the site and relations with users the indictment noted, "For much of its operation, the Mega Conspiracy has offered an 'Uploader Rewards' Program, which promised premium subscribers transfers of cash and other financial incentives to upload popular works, including copyrighted works, to computer servers under the Mega Conspiracy's direct control and for the Conspiracy's ultimate financial benefit."

The seven suspects have been charged with participating in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

12 comments:

Thanks for the post! I just found an fbi press release on it, crazy stuff. None of these guys are US citizens, but their countries have extradition to the US...they must have had their servers or something based somewhere in the states. What a mess!

But let me get this straight, they have been up since 2005 and the feds think half a billion was lost, but movies like avatar have made well over 2.7 billion since 2009, seems like small game if you look at the big picture

Yeah me too. I often used to share my pictures and project reports with other buddies of mine. And while I dont anymore this would of ruined me had it happened earlier. I can only imagine how many people got screwed by this.

just a bunch of BS, the idea is to try and get press coverage and make sopa pipa look good, they know they'll lose the trial and probably won't even get that far, but because it makes the news people think certain things regardlessgotta wonder if rapidshare is next

They can't win a trial unless the judge/jury are biased, they did not tell people to upload certain things, they just host whatever people upload and quite often take down copyrighted material. What crap.